With the popularity of smart terminals, a smart terminal (e.g., mobile phone) may either access the Internet via WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) AP (access point) or cellular network (GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), 3G or LTE (Long Term Evolution)) at home or in a same company or office, or at the same time access the WiFi AP or cellular network for the smart terminal.
It is known that, a WiFi AP may access the Internet via wired network (2M, 10M, 100M or 1000M), cellular network (GPRS, 3G or LTE) or other WiFi AP (corresponding to Mesh network). Theses networks are not absolutely advantageous over the 3G/LTE back-end egress of the smart terminal. Therefore, even if the smart terminal selects WiFi to access the Internet, a maximum egress bandwidth of the smart terminal may not be guaranteed, especially when multiple smart terminals access a same AP simultaneously.
At present, a parallel access is often adopted to improve the egress bandwidth of smart terminal. That is to say, a smart terminal (for example, a multi-mode terminal) may enable both the WiFi interface and the cellular interface, and select flexibly access network according to scheduling strategy to transmit user data, thereby making full use of the whole back-end egress bandwidth of the smart terminal.
However, in research and practice of the conventional technology, it is found that only how the smart terminal utilizes multiple access networks to maximize the throughput or how to achieve a seamless switching is taken into consideration in the existing implementation of the parallel access, but not to consider the cooperation of the multiple smart terminals utilizing the parallel access. That is to say, even though a certain terminal adopts parallel access, it is only guaranteed that the smart terminal itself can use the both interfaces (i.e., the WiFi interface and the cellular interface), but may not bring benefit to the other smart terminals in the same network. Therefore, the question of how to make full use of the back-end egress bandwidth of WiFi AP and cellular network is still to be solved.